A photographer recalls capturing lives on the margins following the US occupation
Sneak Preview Screening: From Okinawa with Love (Okinawa yori Ai wo Komete)
followed by a Q&A with director Hiroshi Sunairi

Wednesday, August 14, at 6:00 pm*
*Please note early start time.

In Japanese with English subtitles USA/Japan 2023 92 minutes (special edition) 

Directed by: Hiroshi Sunairi
Produced by: Ider Batbayar and Hiroshi Sunairi
Featuring: Mao Ishikawa

Film courtesy of Moolin Productions

Photographer Mao Ishikawa has spent her life documenting the lives of others. But as director Hiroshi Sunairi shows us in "From Okinawa with Love," Ishikawa's own story is as thrilling as any she has preserved in her work.

Born in Okinawa, Ishikawa moved to Tokyo when she was 19 to attend the Workshop School of Photography held by influential photographer Shomei Tomatsu. Upon returning to Okinawa, she began to document a society heavily impacted by the US military presence. Beginning with the women who worked in the bars catering to African American soldiers outside the bases, Ishikawa focused on the marginalized and underrepresented.

Ishikawa's photographs went on to be widely exhibited and published in popular photo books, including her "Hot Days in Camp Hansen" (1982). The tagline of the latest republished edition of the book, "Red Flower - The Women of Okinawa," simply reads "There was love," as the photographs it contains tell of friendships, love affairs, and wild nights.

Throughout "From Okinawa with Love," Sunairi allows Ishikawa the space to do what she does best: dominate the room with her gift of storytelling and a charisma that draws everyone into her memories, set against a background of history, politics, racism, love, and illness. In his director's statement, Sunairi explains that he "was careful not to colonize my subject, not to speak of Okinawa as my own as a Japanese, not to objectify women, and not to explain Mao Ishikawa in my own words."

The respect Sunairi has for his subject is abundantly clear, as he quietly accompanies Ishikawa while she reveals her innermost self, until, in one of the most captivating and beautiful scenes in recent Japanese documentary, the photographer, now old and infirm, allows herself to be filmed as the young men and women she once photographed were. As she moves from being behind her own camera to being in front of Sunairi's, the radiant beauty, fiery wit and searing honesty of Ishikawa as captured in "From Okinawa with Love" is, simply put, documentary film at its best.

Please join us for this sneak preview of "From Okinawa with Love" before the Japan release on August 31, 2024.

For more (in Japanese): https://okinawayoriaiwokomete.com/

Director, producer, cinematographer and editor HIROSHI SUNAIRI hails from Hiroshima, and completed his studies in Visual Arts at the State University of New York. His first feature-length documentary, "Making Mistakes" (2011), was screened at several international film festivals. He went on to make numerous award-winning documentary and essay films. "From Okinawa with Love" is the second film in a trilogy, following "Okinawa Philadelphia" (2023). Sunairi has taught in the Department of Art at New York University, since 2001.

Please make your reservations at the FCCJ Reception Desk 03- 3211-3161 or register online. All film screenings are private, noncommercial events primarily for FCCJ members and their guests.

- Thomas Ash, Film Committee